by Lee Matalone
“Why would someone do that?” I say. “There’s nothing better than a window in a shower.”
“An outdoor shower may be better.”
“Well, in this climate, that wouldn’t be practical. Maybe when we move to Key West that will make sense.”
He places the head of the screwdriver at the seam of the window and hits its rubber handle with a wood-armed hammer. He works his way around the perimeter of the window, hammering and hammering. “But when we buy the pink house in Key West the priority is to enclose the existing, interior bathroom in glass, so I can look out over the sea when I shit.”
“We’ve talked about this,” I say. “I can’t understand why you would want someone to see you shitting.”
“If someone makes the effort to sail out there, notice me, drop anchor, and watch me in my business, then kudos to them. They’ve earned the show.”
“Do you think Key West will happen for us?”
“It could.” He pauses to blink. He rubs his eyelids, squishing and stretching them apart. I pray that a splinter from the window hasn’t snuck beneath his fingernail. “But maybe it’s better that we don’t ever move to Key West. That we always have this fantasy ocean house.”
“But what about shitting while the sea blows in over you? Don’t you want that?”
He hammers once more and something pops. The paint seal has cracked. He rotates the window’s plastic handle until the bottom of the window has floated six inches away from the sill. Cold air rushes in immediately.
“This is good, great,” he says, sticking his fingers through the opening and wiggling them.
“Careful,” I say. “A bird may think those are fat worms.”
He pulls his fingers back inside and steps out of the shower. He takes me by the shoulders and I feel his tongue against my molars. This is not the first time he has tried to find love in my mouth.
“It’s a shame,” he says, removing his mouth from mine and folding his arms around my waist. He rests his head on my shoulder. We sway.
In our pink house, I say, people will not know what to make of us.
“That’s part of the fun, isn’t it?” He turns the shower’s handle, initiating a trail of sputtering water down the drain. Shortly, it soothes into a stream.
I make a pot of tea. I sit on the toilet and he showers. We talk about the pink house. This is love, too.
“Do you need me to bring you anything from the house?” my mother asks.
Over the line, I can hear my mother smoking out in the yard. She never smoked until retirement. She doesn’t really smoke now, but she is trying to smoke. She is trying to have a bad habit but it just cannot seem to stick.
“Nothing I can think of.”
“Do you need linens?” She quiets to inhale, exhale. “Should I bring a towel?”
“No. Your bed is already made up. I have towels. We’re ready for you.”
“You and the dog?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I’ll bring linens, just in case. And tea. The kind you like.”
“I have those things, but that’s fine.”
“See you tomorrow. And the dog.”
In the early morning, too early for jogging or downward dogs or phone conversation, I wake and walk to the guest bathroom. The light in the bathroom is on and the door open, which I like to close. I dislike coming upon empty rooms. But the light is on and the door is open. This happens the next night, and then the next.
On the fourth night, I set a timer to shut the light and the door. I brush my teeth and wash my face and stare into the mirror at myself, willing to remember to shut the light, to shut the door.
On a particular Norwegian island, the lives of married women are divided into “home time” and “away time.” Which is which depends on when their husbands are at sea working on oil rigs, or not. These women must make time transition smoothly between these two periods, so that the children aren’t always crying for Daddy, so that routine isn’t jettisoned entirely.
The Norwegian island woman’s life is one of waiting. Waiting for him to arrive, but also, more poignantly, waiting for him to leave, so she can have her space, her own routines back. She spends days in anticipation of him leaving, of his returning to the rig. She yearns, as it is said, to close the room.
After the fourth night, I do not wake up and walk to the bathroom. I sleep through dawn. A few days pass before I try to recall whether or not the light was on when I awoke the next morning. By then, it is too late to remember. I have to move on, not knowing.
Garage
Shortly after graduating from our university, M. wrote a series of poems about a particular dumpster that sat on the edge of the campus parking lot, a dumpster that had inspired him because of its disregarded utility. In one poem, he placed the image of a gas cap, which, he said, was inspired by my own car’s gas cap that was stuck as I had attempted to drive away from the town where we had fallen in love. Neither of us could get it off. We were trying to say goodbye. But the gas cap wouldn’t budge.
At the gas pump, he wasn’t listening to me as I told him about a dream I had of burning down my house, a fantasy of mine that I had lived at that point only inside of a poem.
M. has started writing about dumpsters again. This time, he is fixated on a dumpster on the campus where he now teaches. I, too, have been writing about this dumpster, which I’ve known only through his poetry. In the past two months, we must have exchanged nearly twenty poems about this dumpster.
I feel it, our yearning awaking from its hibernation. I want to drive four hundred miles to go and drink of him.
One day, I ask, over email, could he show me photos of the dumpster?
He sends me a link to a folder of images. The dumpster under a cloudy, steel-gray winter sky. The dumpster in early spring, buds blooming white on the dogwoods behind the parking lot. The dumpster occupied, a white mattress with yellow stains angled in its basin.
W O N D E R F U L, I write back.
A two-car garage for a one-person household.
Alternate uses for a garage, according to DIYRemodel.com:
Home gym
Home theater
Extra bedroom
Teen hang-out
Craft room
Home office
Yoga studio
Casino/bar
Man cave
In the latest poem M. sent, I could not find the dumpster. All the others had featured some direct reference to that yellow hulking void. But not this one.
I look at this latest email with the latest dumpster poem, sitting atop missives of condolences re: my marriage and electric bills and subscription notices to newsletters and sales sales sales. With the PDF of the poem, he attached no illuminating note. Just the attachment. He thought he was being clear.
I think I finally register what he is saying. I have found the dumpster, beating inside my own chest. Disregarded utility.
Pat and I kept our garage empty, so you could put what you are supposed to put in it. I even mopped once a week, because I’m that kind of person. You could perform a circumcision on the concrete. It was that bare and clean.
My mother, accruing a lifetime of things, had to resort to the garage for storage: boxes of coats and sweaters in the summer, boxes of linen dresses in the winter, boxes of unwanted clothes for Goodwill, side tables that had been replaced by side tables found at sandy antique malls by the sea. For one woman, she had so much stuff. There was no room for a car in my childhood garage.
Pat and I never spent much time in the garage. Cut into the wall was even a window that faced west. We could have had wine on a little table in there and watched the sun set.
These are the types of things you think about after it’s too late.
For fifteen years, M. has offered me hope in the form of compliments, though they are also daggers. Brilliant. Beautiful. I know you are, but what am I?
His words glisten right before entry, enchanting, and then they draw blood. Knives do not h
ave to clean up their mess. Their sole responsibility is to incise. Brilliant . . .
W O N D E R F U L, Valerie wrote on Thomas’s draft of “The Waste Land.”
Those capital letters imprinted down the length of the page say more about the human condition than anything Pound wrote in the margins, or maybe even anything her husband wrote in that poem.
Brilliant. Wonderful. Beautiful.
Something I have learned as an adult: The You is always changing, but the I remains the same.
Parked in the driveway, I keep the car running. On the radio, the announcer explains how people around the world are mourning the loss of a beloved rock star. Other musicians, normal people, talk about how this stranger has changed their lives. He was seventy-six years old.
Pat is thirty-six.
I shut the engine. I cry for the rock star.
“It’s just right,” my mother says, stepping out of her car inside my garage. This new garage is bare, too, though not as clean as Pat’s and mine. I would not advise performing surgery in here.
“You haven’t even seen the inside yet.”
“I have a feeling.”
I gather her bag from the passenger seat, which measures the size of a diaper bag. She has just started becoming economical. It is her new modus operandi. Never more than necessary. She has even cleaned out the garage.
“I thought you were staying a week.”
“I am. I didn’t think I needed to pack a ball gown. Can we go inside?”
I go inside, into the kitchen. As much as she is beginning to contain her life, to cut back, to downsize, she will always be a messy human. Just not here, in my house. Even though she can’t seem to keep her shoes from scattering about her own home, her purses and coats draped on dining room chairs and couch cushions, when she comes to visit, she always makes sure to bring her shoes and jacket to her room, to close the kitchen cupboards. I need to start telling her that I believe she is a good person.
But she is still standing in the garage, the door open between us.
“I want you to know I’m happy you’re here,” I say.
“This country is falling apart. Haven’t you been watching the news? Though maybe it’s no worse than it’s always been.”
“Yes. But what does that have to do with you being here?”
“Did I ever tell you, when I was young, my mother gave me a black baby doll?”
“No,” I say.
“If it all does go to hell, I may have to live in your garage. You may have to put a little heater in there and a bed for me. I would only need a little couch and a coffee table for my books and coffee.”
“You would never give up that house.”
“Do you want to be a part of this world? More and more I don’t. I would give up that house.”
“We can talk about it, when the country dissolves.”
“Give me the tour. Then can we nap?”
She enters my home through the kitchen.
Taller than my mother by a good four inches, I press her head into my neck. You are good, my arms around her shoulders say. You took care of me, you take care of me. You are good. You are good.
I write M. an email with my final dumpster poem. (This one comes without line breaks, breathless.)
Threatening freedom, the husband goes on a walk alone to the garbage can at the end of the driveway. The family receptacle cannot contain the odor, the plastic signifier of decay, so he continues walking, on and on into the festering July heat. Confusion, as to whether or not the odor is his own, the taste in his nostrils conjuring an Egyptian garbage city, a place far from here.
At the university dumpster, the one into which he has tossed many a student paper on many a world conqueror, he tosses the bag. She is not there behind him, but if she were she would tell him to quit thinking about why he is leaving. What’s done is done. The details don’t matter. Larry, she would say, in this wide world, there is no niche for a miniaturist.
No niche for a miniaturist, a line that now lives at the end of the final poem in a series of our poems about a dumpster. The words being the thing that will outlast us. With the poem, we roll a boulder over the cave’s entrance. The end.
Backyard
More and more homeowners are fencing themselves in. A Boston fence maker estimated that his sales have risen at the rate of 45 percent per year. A Denver fence maker described his business as “golden.” In Houston’s yellow pages, no fewer than forty-seven fence companies advertise their wares, from waist-high chain links to six-foot cedars.
At a yard sale, I was sorting through a stack of old magazines when I came across this paragraph from a 1967 issue of Newsweek. We have learned that it is okay to be afraid of one another. Our neighbors, our sisters, our lovers are coming in from the street, reaching our front doors. We can practically hear their nails scratching the wood. We build walls on our lawns to keep them out.
We are constantly surrounding ourselves with fences. Just because you can’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Chain links, please keep Daddy away.
A shed sits at the edge of my property, where my land meets my neighbor’s. The shed is tucked beneath a large oak tree. It is a mess, to put it lightly. Holes pockmark the concrete floor, through which strands of grass stick up their necks. Formations of dirt follow from the door, which sits askew on its hinges and requires lifting off of its resting place on the ground to open or shut. Pieces of cardboard sit on the rafters, someone’s half-effort to block out the rain.
The shed is empty. No garden tools or washing machine or hobby desk where somebody glued pre-cut balsa wood together to make a ship or a plane. Just a space that someone had cut out beneath the trees, maybe just to prove that they could.
I am trying to take it back from nature. Apologies. I have plans for this space.
I am inspecting one of the shed’s three windows. Water has seeped in and the stool has begun to rot. With a hammer I pry it out. The wood is thick and particular, and except for the rotted wood, there are no signs of frass. No termites have penetrated this wood. Cypress. Someone built a cypress shed here, though there is not a cypress tree for hundreds of miles, perhaps out of longing for their original home.
At the showing, my Realtor assured me that it could easily be torn down.
I could never. This is memorial architecture. This was someone’s temple. Is. It would be criminal to tear it down. I can’t. I have plans for this place.
We are supposed to be shopping for furniture, but instead my mom and I have stopped for pedicures in a salon decorated with plastic horse figurines. We are staring at a large glass tank with a large gray-brown fish who can barely turn around in his tank, and we are feeling sorry for the fish.
“His name is Conrad,” Phillip, our nail technician, says. Phillip wears fifty-five years light around his shoulders; he is thin and angley. He has already left us once to take a smoke break. He tells us he loves the countryside. He used to live in New York City, but all he did was work, work, work and at the end of the day he would go to a bar. He says he can go to a bar anywhere. Why should someone have to work more just to do the same thing? You understand me, he says to my mom and me.
My mother and I share the same feet. Our calluses are thick and break into crusty, desert plateaus. We joke that perhaps our calluses are the reason we have trouble retaining men.
Mom is looking at her hands.
“Did you want a manicure, too?” I ask.
“These hands are the reason you’re here, you know.”
“As a surgeon, that makes sense. The hands pay the bills.”
“Yes, but that’s not what I was referring to.”
Inside the salon, there is no ventilation. When we first walked in, we worried about the chemicals, but we sat down anyway.
“When I was in the orphanage—I don’t think I ever told you this—your grandfather and grandmother were just walking through. As he was passing by, I reached out and grabbed him. He looked at me, pick
ed me up, and that was it. If I hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be sitting here. We would not be getting high on chemicals in a nail salon in Virginia.”
In the tank, Conrad floats like a submarine, his weight making his movements incremental, heavy. He looks miserable.
“He gets angry if I don’t talk to him,” Phillip says, taking my mother’s hand. “Manicure? Yes. Manicure.” He continues, “I’ve had Conrad fifteen years. If I feed him too much, he will die. I can never feed him too much. He’s my boy.” Phillip sets my mother’s hand down on the spa chair’s armrest and walks closer to the tank. He clicks his tongue and taps his finger on the glass. Come, Conrad. Come. Glacially, Conrad swings his body around to face Phillip. His small fins flap with great effort, bringing his body closer and closer to his father until their noses are touching.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” we agree.
“Is it just you two?” Phillip says, returning to my mother’s feet.
Just us.
“No husbands? No kids?” he says.
My mother points at me. “She’s it.”
“And you? Where is your baby?”
I pull out my phone and show him photos of Tito. Playful Tito on his back in a patch of light on the wood floor. Tranquil Tito in my bed, nose tucked between his paws. My boy.
“No human boy?” Phillip asks.
We look at our feet, our hard edges polished off, the nails buffed and painted red (Mom) and nude (me). We have a couple weeks of smoothness before the desert reclaims our soles. We look at our hands, how much daintier they are, beautiful even. Thin fingered, elegant, good for enticing, lovemaking, caring, rearing.
“I made it,” I say to my mother. We hover over the kitchen island, looking down at a surprisingly perfect (to both of us) pie.
“Really? I didn’t know you baked. Is this something you’re doing now?”
“I thought I could learn finally, at the tender age of thirty-four.”
Above our heads, the single bulb of the ceiling lamp illuminates the bulbous red of the pie’s cherries. Encapsulated by light, we cannot make out the shapes of trees outside. The yard reads black. If someone were to peer in at us, a someone we couldn’t see through the dark, they would think we looked like actors on a movie set. We look staged, play-acting domesticity. My mother eats the pie, dutifully and with a glimmer of pleasure.